Stumbling Blocks and Other Unfinished Work by Delores Phillips (review)

This paper engages the paradoxical literary phenomena known as “unfinished works” from two distinct perspectives. First, it offers a Foucauldian analysis of the history of the unfinished label: its rhetorical functions, the ideologies that enable and underlie it, and the types of conversations it has inspired and undermined. Second, after clarifying the unfinished/unfinishable distinction and critiquing the rhetoric of failure that has traditionally dominated literary-philosophical discourses on “unfinishedness,” the paper uses Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities (amongst other texts) to articulate a theory of “unfinishable novels,” defined as “novels that can only be finished as unfinished works.” In conclusion, the paper points to the postwar rise in “circular” and “open-ended” novels as symptomatic of a larger literary shift from “unfinishability” to “unfinalizability,” a shift that can itself be read as constitutive (at least within the history of the novel) of the transition from modernism to postmodernism.

Ḥadīth scholars excelled in continuing the efforts of their precedents by; completing their unfinished work, making up for missed ones, or by fathers completing their sons’ unfinished work; a noble service from the eldest to the books of the youngest. The first scholar known for this is Thābit bin Ḥazm al-Saraqusṭī who completed his son’s Qāssim unfinished book (al-Dalāʾil), when Qāssim died before completing it. This book is not only considered as the most valuable one among Gharīb al-Ḥadīth books in Andalusīya but, as one of the most important books in Gharīb al-Ḥadīth in general. The author based his book al-Dalāīyl on the previous work of Abī Ūbayd al-Qāssim bin Sallām and Ibn Qutayba’s known books in Gharīb al-Ḥadīth, adding to what they’ve missed. He followed their methodology starting with al-Ḥadīth al-Marfoūʿ, followed by al-Mawqūf, then al-Maqṭūʿ, and maintained the precursor’s approach in referencing. Several scholars benefited enormously from this book and classified it among their valued resources. Thābit bin Qāssim bin Thābit – the grandson – was the key narrator for this book, assisting in its spread.

We analyze a discrete-time queueing model where two types of customers, each having their own dedicated server, are accommodated in one single FCFS queue. Service times are deterministically equal to s≥1 time slots each. New customers enter the system according to a general independent arrival process, but the types of consecutive customers may be nonindependent. As a result, arriving customers may (or may not) have the tendency to cluster according to their types, which may lead to more (or less) blocking of one type by the opposite type. The paper reveals the impact of this blocking phenomenon on the achievable throughput, the (average) system content, the (average) customer delay and the (average) unfinished work. The paper extends the results of earlier work where either the service times were assumed to be constant and equal to 1 slot each, or the customers all belonged to the same class. Our results show that, in case of Poisson arrivals, for given traffic intensity, the system-content distribution is insensitive to the length (s) of the service times, but the (mean) delay and the (mean) unfinished work in the system are not. In case of bursty arrivals, we find that all the performance measures are affected by the length (s) of the service times, for given traffic intensity.

The integration between production and quality control has been pointed out as a means to reduce the incidence of waste caused by unfinished work. However, it is necessary the assistance of information technology to facilitate this integration, due the amount of data that must be collected and processed. Thus, the use of tablets is considered a solution to collect and manage information on construction site in a more efficient manner, with strong potential to improve the data sharing and the communication practices in the construction industry, and providing opportunities to innovate management processes. This paper proposes a data modeling to assist in the development of applications for production and quality control, and it presents the preliminary evaluation of the implementation of the proposed model in a case study. The model consists of three integrated modules: work packages, quality and making-do; and it is possible to monitor the percentage of completed packages, unfinished work, the occurrence of informal packages, making-do waste and indicators of quality control. Also, possible integration between data modeling and BIM models are indicated.

Abraham Lincoln and Our "Unfinished Work"

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has passed its fifth birthday and completed two enrollment periods for coverage in the state-based insurance exchanges and Medicaid. The U.S. uninsured rate is lower than ever, and coverage gains appear to be improving access to primary care and medications, affordability of care, and self-reported health.1 But challenges for health care reform persist: millions of Americans are still uninsured, and even for those with coverage, substantial barriers remain to obtaining affordable, high-quality care. More than 30 million U.S. children and adults still lack insurance (see pie chart). Who are they, and what policy options exist for . . .

Many works are attributed to artists after their death, even when someone else has contributed substantively to the content of the work or when the work left by the artist is deemed incomplete by any standard of completion. Call these works posthumous works. These cases give rise to several interesting and related questions about the ontology of artworks and authorship: If the works are incomplete when the first artist dies, then can someone else complete them, or do they remain forever unfinished? Are works that are altered after the artist’s death new and distinct works? If they remain forever unfinished, then what is the unfinished works’ relation to the putatively "finished" work? If, on the other hand, they can be finished and are finished by someone other than the original artist (since the original artist is dead), then to whom to do we give credit: the deceased artist, the finishing artist, or both? Recent accounts of when an artwork is complete make posthumous works impossible. In this paper, we offer an explanation of how the unfinished work of the dead can be completed and why in these cases attributing the work to the dead is justified.

Introduction George Rousseau (bio) I Although history will decide the matter, it is impossible not to endorse John Neubauer’s claim in the introduction to this volume’s predecessor that “Michel Foucault was both a historian and a maker of culture.” 1 He was both, of course, despite the caveats of all sorts of professional historians and learned groups whose ideology and politics differed from his. More Cassandra of culture than Goliath among historians, Foucault was also the lens from whose crystal the discourse of our generation has been shaped; predominantly in our concerns for gender and the body, but even more so in the ways in which sex continues to dominate our discourse and obsess us without liberating us. Foucault’s (almost millennial) predictions that we would become obsessed with sex have been entirely borne out; if not in the Starr report, then in the worldwide movements to repress sex in the workplace, legislate it in the social order, and eliminate it on the Internet. Yet nowhere are the antennae more directed against those groups who work for the repression of sex than in the West’s progressive universities—the very place where Foucault’s influence has been most acutely felt. Universities have become virtual sites for the monitoring [End Page 127] and policing of these attitudes, and they deserve much credit for taking on so onerous a task. In precisely this context it is difficult to think of any recent thinker who has had more influence within the contemporary academy, especially in our progressive North American universities. Other French thinkers have left their mark: Derrida has influenced the daily practice of humanists and social scientists, as have his brethren in Paris; and it would be gratuitous to try to prove that Kristeva and other French feminists have not been almost equally influential. But Foucault, more than these, virtually defined, and shaped, our generation’s sense of the mission of the humanities and social sciences, as confirmed by the number of references to him and books written in the crucible of his method—this despite the rhetorical gun held to his head by those seeking dramatic advantage in decrying him as a bandit, especially British historian Lawrence Stone’s claim about “Foucault’s crimes against humanity” and, more recently, Harold Bloom’s view of Foucault’s Satanic approach as the “disease of humanity.” Foucault, having abandoned the folly of the university’s self-proclaimed higher mission to inculcate national morality in the name of the state, taught us instead how language and discourse had been manipulated throughout history for the purposes of power and repression. And he demonstrated that primary authors were not exempt from these processes, no matter how aloof the form and content of their writing. In this sense Foucault’s fate, both during his lifetime and since his death in 1984, has resembled that of Nietzsche (in Neubauer’s words, “his adopted predecessor”). Both thinkers have been microscopically scrutinized and criticized by the practitioners of individual disciplines; yet the lasting significance of their work lies beyond disciplinary boundaries and the borders of “truth” for any given case study or range of problems. Both men ruthlessly challenged the main assumptions of Western culture; each imperiled age-old beliefs thought to have been invulnerable, even immutable. Foucault especially tapped into the body, and the forms in which its modes of expression could become a vehicle for the manipulation of power and the repression of selfhood. He intuited that the humanities, in our modern sense, are commentaries on the body. Little wonder then that his last, unfinished work—a symphony of books in progress—should have been his most ambitious: a history of sexuality from the Greeks to the present time. But not any history: it was a work dedicated to the same galaxy of language, discourse, ideology, power, and repression that enshrines the rest of his intellectual cosmology. For these reasons it is impossible to think of Foucault, the man and his work, apart from the crises of our time more [End Page 128] generally, especially the lingering sense on the eve of the millennium that the twentieth century has been among the most brutal of historical eras...

This chapter explores Muriel Rukeyser's unfinished work on Franz Boas and her engagement with cultural anthropology and indigenous knowledge systems that would be foundational for the work she was producing in the Cold War period. The chapter tells how this gave her new modes and histories to think through and helped her find a language of process that she would use to describe the experience of birth and motherhood. By examining Rukeyser's work on Boas, it also shows the long influence of indigenous thought on midcentury feminism and the aesthetics of the modernist avant-garde. The chapter then traces the legacies of American experimentalism and political radicalism to the ideas and practices of the First Nations peoples. The chapter concludes by noting that Rukeyser's unfinished work on Boas is key to understanding the conditions of her fragmented midcentury life. However, its unfinished nature also shows how her work continued to develop and grow despite the lattice of anticommunist and anti-woman strictures that she would learn to work around and through. A history that becomes visible only as you follow her in and out of the archives.

Reviewed by: Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 by Robert J. Cook Kevin M. Levin (bio) Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865. By Robert J. Cook. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Paper, $24.95.) Few people could have predicted the pace at which Confederate iconography, including battle flags and monuments, have been removed from public spaces following the murder of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in June 2015. The toppling of Confederate icons such as Lee, Jackson, Davis, and Forrest constitutes the most sustained challenge to the Lost Cause narrative since its emergence in the years following the Civil War. Robert J. Cook's Civil War Memories tracks this long and contentious story of the nation's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of the war. The book is organized into two parts and structured chronologically around four narrative themes. Cook's distinction between the Lost Cause, Unionist, emancipationist, and "reconciliatory" narratives that developed in the thirty years following the war will be familiar to most historians. He relies heavily on recent scholarship of Civil War memory to flesh out these four narratives. No book looms larger in the first part than David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), which has dominated scholarly and even popular discussion of Civil War memory. Blight's contention that the "Union cause" and the war's "emancipationist legacy" were eventually overshadowed by the pull of national reunion and reconciliation by the early twentieth century has proved to be a seductive narrative for a nation that continues to struggle with its history of racial discrimination. Cook follows the trajectory laid out by Blight by acknowledging "the flowering of a romantic reconciliatory strain of historical memory that would quickly predominate over its Unionist and emancipationist competitors in the North and in official circles because of its excellent fit with postwar nationalism" (209). At the same time, Cook does not ignore recent scholarship from historians such as Caroline Janney, John Neff, M. Keith Harris, William Blair, and Barbara Gannon, who have argued persuasively that the triumph of sectional reconciliation was never complete. He acknowledges [End Page 735] that Civil War veterans harbored a deep bitterness toward their former enemies and remained steadfast in their commitment to the righteousness of their respective causes well into the twentieth century. Reunion was a fact of Union victory in 1865, but outward signs of sectional bitterness could be found in numerous Blue-Gray events, such as the dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in 1895. In addition, even as Union veterans embraced former enemies on the old battlefields, they remained proud of having taken part in a war that ended slavery and continued to welcome black veterans in many local camps of the Grand Army of the Republic. The memory of emancipation and the embrace of black comrades who aided in saving the Union were not so easily sacrificed at the altar of sectional reconciliation. Of course, this does not mean that African Americans operated on a level playing field. Cook correctly notes that "reconciliation … alongside white-supremacist terror, economic coercion, political disfranchisement, and de jure segregation, pushed African Americans to the margins of national memory" (209). The dominance of reconciliation and the Lost Cause continued through the first half of the twentieth century largely as the result of white southern control of public memory through legal segregation, the erection and dedication of monuments, and the dissemination of other cultural artifacts throughout the region. The second half of Civil War Memories tracks the eventual decline of this narrative, beginning with the civil rights movement and Civil War centennial celebrations. African Americans pushed for civil rights, in part, by reminding the nation of the "unfinished work" of the Civil War with a narrative that highlighted the importance of emancipation and the service of the United States Colored Troops to the Union war effort. Cook's analysis of this watershed moment in Civil War memory is a distilled—though no less compelling—version of his excellent 2007 book, Troubled...

… With a feeling much akin to that with which I looked upon the friend’s — the admirable artist’s — unfinished work, I can fancy many readers turning to these — the last pages which were traced by Charlotte Brontë’s hand. Of the multitude that has read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist’s noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors! At nine o’clock at night, Mrs Gaskell tells, after evening prayers, when their guardian and relative had gone to bed, the three poetesses — the three maidens, Charlotte, and Emily, and Anne — Charlotte being the ‘motherly friend and guardian to the other two’ — ‘began, like restless wild animals, to pace up and down their parlour, “making out” their wonderful stories, talking over plans and projects, and thoughts of what was to be their future life’.KeywordsWild AnimalLiterary HistoryFuture LifePublisher LimitedChannel IslandThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

An Essay from the Unfinished Work 'Portraits of Cities': Edited by Max SaundersEditor's IntroductionIn 1936 Ford began work on a book he thought of as the third volume of a trilogy, joining Provence (1935) and Great Trade Route (1937). Like them, it was to be a book of 'mental travel',1 drawing on his physical travelling with his companion Janice Biala, and (like the earlier two books) illustrated with her drawings. Its conception altered as their travel plans changed. It was originally to have been a continuation of Great Trade Route, taking in locales Ford knew well, such as the South coast of England, Northern France, and Marseilles, together with places he and Biala wanted to visit, such as Tangier and Jaffa. But by 1937 it had settled into the form of a projected collection of 'Portraits of Cities', mainly American. The new title was perhaps meant to invoke that of Ford's second book appearing that year, and equally well-received: Portraits from Life; and to suggest that the new volume would combine the merits of both: intimate portraiture plus magisterial geographical and cultural sweep.Ford only completed four chapters of it, all written in 1937. In the spring of 1938 he said he had 'not got either the material or the frame of mind to write them [. . .]'; probably because of the pressure he was under to finish his enormous critical survey of The March of Literature. Soon after that had been sent to the publisher, though, Ford was suggesting to his agent a new variation of the cities project, now called 'Forty (?) Years of Travel in America'; but he wasn't able to write any more of it before his death the following June.4The three essays on individual cities, Nashville, Boston, and Denver, were all published in the fourth volume of this series, Ford Madox Ford and the City, where the whole project is described in greater detail.5 The present essay was excluded there as not specifically about cities. But its concern with American life, mentality, and culture during the Depression - what he calls the 'state of mind' of the country - makes it especially relevant to this volume. It was written after Ford and Biala travelled to Colorado in August 1937. He had been invited to Boulder to attend the last two weeks of the Writers' Conference of the Rocky Mountains. She had two exhibitions booked, one at Boulder, the other at the Denver Museum. They were in Denver in the third week of August.6 The comment that they had 'zigzagged for exactly twelve months on this day of writing from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains' points to a composition date of November 1937 or later, since they had left France for New York on 1 1 November 1936.7Ford had made extensive lecture tours of the East Coast and the Midwest a decade earlier, from 1926-28, spurred by the success of the individual novels of Parade's End; and he wrote up some of his experiences in an earlier 'mental travel' book, New York is Not America (1927). In the late 1930s he was again a frequent traveler in the USA. He had been appointed as a writer and critic in residence at the small liberal arts college at Olivet, Michigan, starting from the Writers' Conference there in mid July 1937, and staying on for the rest of the year. But this time he was travelling with Biala, his partner throughout the 1930s. She had already produced dust-jacket designs for his novels The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh, and his post-war reminiscences (It Was the Nightingale). But her illustrations were integral to the conception of these later books on travel and culture, with thirty-three in Provence, and twenty- four in Great Trade Route. She was to have provided drawings of each city for 'Portraits of Cities' as she did for Nashville, Boston and Denver. (The drawings of Boston and Denver were reproduced in IFMFS volume 8, Ford Madox Ford and Visual Culture. One of the drawings of Nashville is illustrated here in plate 4, following p. 144.)This essay records Ford's impressions of an America eight years into the Depression which followed the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. …

The article is devoted to studying the real basis of one of the most enigmatic creative ideas of Leo Tolstoy - the unfinished work “Prince Fedor Schetinin”. The hypotheses about the time of writing, as well as historical sources of the fragment, expressed by the domestic experts in Leo Tolstoy’s creative work of the XX century, are analyzed. The version about V. A. Perovsky and A. N. Baryatinsky as the prototypes of the main characters of the work is examined in a critical manner. The events at the Caucasus seat of the Crimean (Eastern) War of 1853-1856 are considered for the first time as a probable basis of the failed conception.

Many works are attributed to artists after their death, even when someone else has contributed substantively to the content of the work or when the work left by the artist is deemed incomplete by any standard of completion. Call these works posthumous works. These cases give rise to several interesting and related questions about the ontology of artworks and authorship: If the works are incomplete when the first artist dies, then can someone else complete them, or do they remain forever unfinished? Are works that are altered after the artist’s death new and distinct works? If they remain forever unfinished, then what is the unfinished works’ relation to the putatively “finished” work? If, on the other hand, they can be finished and are finished by someone other than the original artist (since the original artist is dead), then to whom to do we give credit: the deceased artist, the finishing artist, or both? Recent accounts of when an artwork is complete make posthumous works impossible. In this paper, we offer an explanation of how the unfinished work of the dead can be completed and why in these cases attributing the work to the dead is justified.

Trauerspiel—the“mourning play”—and tragedy. Recognizing the divide between the genres, and, by extension, the gulf separating the shadowy German Baroque from the brilliance of French Classicism,is of particular importance to the volume’s contributors since they will endeavor to draw out how the Trauerspiel, as a genre, idea, or configuration , resides in celebrated texts of the grand siècle, and especially in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. The editors gesture toward the imaginary: “We suggest paying attention to things that are not written, to the mourning drama of the unfinished project” (8). Valuing what academia habitually disdains—flights of fancy, blurred chronologies,and unfinished work—the study acknowledges how deducing,surmising, and hypothesizing are elemental practices of literary scholarship. Despite the repeated evocations of the nonexistent text, each contributor is a careful and knowledgeable reader of Benjamin’s existing text and aptly draws on the defining characteristics of the Trauerspiel to illuminate its presence in Pascal (Emma Gilby and Hall Bjornstad), Corneille (Claude Haas, Timothy Hampton, Katharine Ibbett, John D. Lyons, Hélène Merlin-Kajman),and Racine (Christopher Braider,Susan Maslan,and Éric Méchoulan). Although they focus on repetitive elements—“creatureliness,”a vision that“knows no eschatology,” melancholy princes, crooked crowns, intriguers and tyrant-martyrs— the readings are inspiring and innovative; they productively upset the“myth of French national exceptionalism that classicism sustains” (96). It is a pity the volume neglects to consider works that might genuinely have constituted a French Trauerspiel, i.e., the melancholy worlds of Hardy, de Viau, Tristan L’Hermite, or Rotrou. In ignoring these authors in favor of canonical ones,the contributors replicate a vision of the seventeenth century they have condemned. If Benjamin extensively read the“minor”authors of the German baroque, why would he not also have been drawn to the French ones? Still, rather than write off the categories of the baroque and the classical as reductive nonsense, the volume, capped off by Jane O. Newman’s“Afterword,”effectively models how to draw on these divisions to overcome entrenched chauvinistic barriers and envisage valuable correspondences between them. Wellesley College (MA) Hélène Bilis Blanckeman, Bruno, et Barbara Havercroft, éd. Narrations d’un nouveau siècle: romans et récits français (2001–2010). Paris: PSN, 2013. ISBN 978-2-87854-576-0. Pp. 320. 24 a. The 2011 Cerisy colloquium on the early twenty-first-century French novel resulted in this volume of twenty-three essays contributed by academics from Europe, Canada, and the United States. Beyond the editors’prefacing overview of the contributions , the opening essay reminds readers of a generic given of the novel: its inescapable negotiation with the “real.” The essay sets up useful categories in order to measure subtle but real innovations in twenty-first-century French novelistic production: 252 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 253 “le rapport au réel (référentiel, historique), le rapport au réel (autobiographique, biographique) [...] et enfin le rapport aux récits antérieurs, qui aboutit peut-être à une mise en question encore plus radicale du réel et du genre”(17). Five more sections of essays offer numerous examples of these negotiations with the so-called real.A first section, “Au regard du temps,” acknowledges novels with a relationship to history, especially recent history (World War II and Algeria, for instance). But unlike the novels of the 80s and 90s that accepted these histories as orthodoxy or reference, these newer narratives interrogate history, eschewing certainty in favor of ellipsis and even invention. The section titled “L’appel de la cité” stretches its thematic designation in order to accommodate essays on issues of individual and society, of “engagement”— including a more nuanced approach to the political and social responsibilities of the writer, of national identity (for pieds-noirs, for instance), and of human relationship to an increasingly alienated natural world. “Au miroir de soi” drills down on the question of intimacy revealed in autofictions; a polemic against exhibitionism is countered by other appreciations of the transformations of the“récit de soi”as it writes its own body. “Au miroir des livres” looks at quirky and erudite works in which the mind practices encyclop...